Monday, December 17, 2012

The law of large numbers means that horrific, improbable
events will happen from time to time in a country of >310MM people.

There are actually two mortality risks Americans face that I
find shockingly low. One is the risk of
dying in a commercial plane crash. It is
absolutely remarkable that a plane carrying thousands of gallons of jet fuel,
with engines the size of automobiles, can travel at 150mph on the ground, rise
tens of thousands of feet into the air at speeds reaching 600mph, travel
thousands of miles, and then land on a narrow strip of asphalt less than two
miles long, all while being controlled by a human being, and still have less
than a 1 in 10MM chance of crashing.

The other risk I find to be surprisingly low is the risk of
dying in a random mass shooting. There
are over 200MM privately owned firerms in the US, and over 50MM households have
at least one firearm. And yet random mass
shootings occur at the rate of fewer than 5 per year, and those involving
children are much, much less frequent.
If we define an opportunity for a mass shooting as one year of access to
a firearm in the home, then the probability of one such opportunity turning
into a mass shooting is comparable to the probability of a plane crash. That is, if you lived next to a gun owner,
and you somehow managed to convince him that if he were to go on a random murderous
rampage with his gun during the next year, that he should shoot you dead first,
just as a courtesy, then your increased risk of dying over the next year would
be equivalent to the risk of taking a one-way trip on a commercial plane.

I think it almost goes without saying that the risk of dying
in a random mass shooting (or any shooting actually, as long as you’re not a
criminal or suicidal) is so small as to be negligible compared to other risks
in life, and we should waste no more time or resources on the problem unless
evidence arises that the risk is increasing by orders of magnitude. In fact, the statistics show that the risk is
actually decreasing. Despite the
increase in US population, the frequency of mass shootings has stayed
relatively constant, and the rate of shootings at schools has actually declined.

The real lesson of the Newtown massacre is that we should
not let statistically insignificant events be blown out of proportion by the media
and by our own emotions. The coming push
to enact new laws to restrict our liberties, whether they involve the right to
own and carry a gun, the right to have a weird personality, or the right to
produce and consume media with violent content, should be opposed vigorously. If media focus on exceedingly rare (but
statistically inevitable) tragedies allows the ratchet of liberty-reducing
law-making to progress with each event, then we will become less free over
time. At times like this, it is worth
recalling Benjamin Franklin’s famous maxim, usually paraphrased for dramatic
effect as: “Any society that would give up a little
liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”